History
As the whole book is organised thematically, the conclusion offers to span the evolution of the discourse on spas throughout the long eighteenth century, reprocessing the various notions addressed in the book within a stricter chronological frame. Three main topics are discussed in relation to the evolution of spas and spa towns throughout the century: medicalisation, commercialisation and cosmopolitanism.
‘From bog to jug: a risky remedy?’ explores the multiple representations of the dangers of the water cure. It challenges the idea that mineral waters were yet another cure-all in the quack pharmacopoeia of the eighteenth-century commercialised and competitive medical world. Relying on recent scholarship in the history of medicine, I contextualise the contemporary accusations against water doctors in eighteenth-century medicine, and I address the question of spa promotion, rooted in the relationship between commerce and medicine at the heart of the development of spa towns. In a second section, ‘waters as pharmakon’, I turn to the descriptions of water treatment as a corrosive and potentially dangerous remedy. Waters, doctors argued, were not to be taken lightly, and could have dramatic consequences on the patient’s life if their intake was not properly monitored by medical prescription. This discourse aimed at fighting the practices of self-prescription, especially the habits of the local people of drinking purging waters at smaller wells. The last section, ‘Brine, mud and dung’, focuses on the waters themselves and their literal murkiness: some drinking wells produced cloudy waters with stinking smells, and their origins could be traced in the muddy ponds of nearby swamps. Contemporary descriptions of baths and bathing facilities could be revolting. Many a watering place was satirised as a house of office, and the results of constant purging were exposed to the reader in rich scatological imagery.
The introduction provides a useful synthesis of the development of British spas in the long eighteenth century. It is both a preliminary reading to the chapters and a pedagogical overview of the phenomenon. It provides a map of spas in the eighteenth century specifically designed with cartographies, based on an original survey. It aims to give the reader a set of categories so they may navigate the book with a clear idea of the size and scale of spas, the various types of mineral waters and the methods of treatment, as well as an account of the chemical analyses performed. This introduction takes stock of the multiple primary sources under study, their genre and their popularity, as well as the methods implemented to interpret them. It clearly sets out the purpose of the book and gives a synthetical review of previous and current scholarship on the topic.
In the medical world of eighteenth-century Britain, doctors, caregivers and relief-seeking patients considered mineral waters a valuable treatment alongside drugs and other forms of therapy. Although the pre-eminence of Bath cannot be denied, this book offers to widen the scope of the culture of water-taking and examines the great variety of watering places, spas and wells in eighteenth-century British medicine and literature. It offers to veer away from a glamorous image of Georgian Bath refinement and elegant sociability to give a more ambivalent and diverse description of watering places in the long eighteenth century. The book starts by reasserting the centrality of sickness in spa culture, and goes on to examine the dangers of mineral water treatment. The notion of ‘murky waters’ constitutes a closely followed thread in the five chapters that evolve in concentric circles, from sick bodies to financial structures. The idea of ‘murkiness’ is an invitation to consider the material and metaphorical aspect of mineral waters, and disassociate them from ideas of cleanliness, transparency, well-being and refinement that twenty-first-century readers spontaneously associate with spas. At the crossroads between medical history, literary studies and cultural studies, this study delves into a great variety of primary sources, probing into the academic medical discourse on the mineral components of British wells, as well as the multiple forms of literature associated with spas (miscellanies, libels and lampoons, songs, travel narratives, periodicals and novels) to examine the representation of spas in eighteenth-century British culture.
‘Pump room politics and the murky past of spas’ takes a look at the political impact of spa societies of temporary visitors, who gathered for a season before returning to their homes bearing new ideas and new information. It starts by examining the politics of gossip, a recurrent theme in spa literature, made no less dangerous by its gender bias and its ramifications into cultures of power. In a second section, ‘Healing the nation’, the chapter addresses the national issues at stake in the spa towns, and the political role of master of ceremonies and the colonial dynamics at work in British spa towns. Finally, the chapter dwells on the religious heritage of healing waters in the eighteenth century by tracing the resurgence of Catholicism in the culture of British spas, and the ways in which this was negotiated in the discourse of medical doctors, visitors and literary authors. Relying on the work of A. Walsham on the reformation of holy waters, their disappearance and their modes of persistence in early modern culture, this chapter investigates the eighteenth-century sites of Roman Catholicism in which mineral waters kept some of their original holiness. Spas such as St Winifred’s in Wales and St Chad’s in London were clearly remembered as holy wells, and the rituals associated with them were not forgotten by contemporary authors.
‘Pumping and pouring: watering places and the money business’ looks at the representation of investment, speculation and the circulation of money at private and public levels. The first section focuses on the discourse on gambling in watering places. Before casinos existed, games rooms were open and gambling was one of the attractions of spas available to the sick and bored – games like pharo, quadrille and hazzard were at the heart of many a cautionary poem. The metaphor of gambling extended to the ambitious investors in the development of spas. Their hubris was exposed in narratives of failure or corruption such as Austen’s unfinished Sanditon. Further examples of urban speculation are exposed in a second section. At the other end of the spectrum, lack of money was a lurking phenomenon in spa literature. In the major spas, medical doctors published propositions for monitoring the poor, regulating and financing their access to the baths or the wells. In medium-sized spas, the discrepancy between advertising tracts and the scarcity of lodgings was often acute. In all cases, social promiscuity was an object of constant worry, and fortune-hunting was represented as a favourite sport.
This chapter reasserts the importance of illness and medicine in watering places. Sick bodies took centre stage, and spa towns were first and foremost places of cure and care rather than the clean and sparkling Georgian places of leisure to which they have sometimes been reduced. The chapter opens on the major literary references regularly invoked for eighteenth-century spas: the novels of Smollett, Austen and Burney, stressing how their initial attraction to the spa was rooted in one character’s illness. It also relies on letter-writers’ testimonies to show the degree of trust that could be placed in the curative virtues of mineral waters and thus fight the idea that illness was only a pretext to visit spas. A second section presents the various forms of sickness which could require water treatment, and which were regularly written about in medical treatises, namely gout and nervous diseases, sex-related diseases and diseases of the skin. The one characteristic they all share is they are chronic. Spas are therefore relevant to the cultural history of chronic diseases, as they were integrated in wider forms of care than the reductive patient–doctor relationship, which is only a small fraction of the experience of sickness. It suggests that the focus could be shifted from the sickness to the sick and their experiences, and spas are a good place to start, with the multiple case histories presented in mineral water treatises.
‘Waters of desire: promiscuity, gender and sexuality’ shows how spa towns were a favourite setting for narratives of transgression. Watering places were an imaginary space opening up possibilities of otherness in self-fashioning as much as in relationships. The chapter centres on bodily behaviours, and cultural constructions of the body. It starts with a section on ‘Nudity’, from the desirable neoclassical nudity of bathing women celebrated in the lyrical poetry of miscellanies to the farcical nakedness of men trapped on the beach with no clothes. The unusual proximity of bodies, the ‘dishabilles’ or ‘riding dress’ of women staged in songs and satire, created a suitable setting for the marriage market and adultery, as argued in the following section. A spa visit, in comedies and novels, triggered many possibilities of dangerous meetings and secret relationships. At the same time, women were represented with some degree of agency in such plots – many women would go to a spa independently of their husbands and their stories permeated many a narrative that used spas as a setting. Spa comedies revolved around the idea that the multiple public spaces of spa towns fostered performance in all manners of relationships, and mocked such theatricality of manners in their excessive characters. The last section, ‘Gender roles and gender fluidity’, offers to explore these excessive performative behaviours and the gender-bending possibilities they opened up.
This concluding chapter tackles the question of Dolto’s twenty-first-century reputation and what France is to do with her legacy.
Considering various references to Dolto in intellectual and popular culture, it shows that after 2000, she was no longer seen as a unifying national expert, but rather as someone linked to a particular ideological outlook, whose ideas were a suitable subject for mockery. Efforts to continue her agenda by her daughter or the politician Edwige Antier, or by opponents of equal marriage legislation, demonstrate that Dolto’s thinking became a polarising rather than a unifying force.
The chapter also shows how, towards the end of her life in the 1980s, Dolto was disconcerted by an increased focus on the psychology of race and empire in France’s former colonies, and unable to adapt her ideas to this development.
As Dolto’s life recedes into history, it becomes easier to see her ideas as products of a particular set of historical circumstances, rather than – as she and her followers believed – timeless truths about the human condition. While there are good reasons for wishing to retain some of Dolto’s contribution, it is doubtful that the ongoing desire to celebrate the positive aspects of her interventions can withstand the increasing criticism of the problematic and outdated aspects of her ideas.
This chapter looks at Dolto’s ideas in relation to autism, and the scandal around the relatively poor outcomes for French autistic children that emerged after 2000. It shows that Dolto played a significant and hitherto under-appreciated role in promoting psychoanalytic understandings and treatments of autism in France, specifically the idea of autism as resulting from defective or toxic mothering.
The first part of the chapter places this aspect of her career in the context of the radical psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the relationship between radical psychiatry and Lacanian psychoanalysis, with particular reference to the ideas and work of Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and especially Maud Mannoni, a protégée of Dolto’s. It shows how Mannoni and Dolto saw so-called childhood psychoses, including autism, through the prism of antipsychiatric ideas, arguing that autism was not an inborn condition but the result of a pathogenic family environment.
The second section examines Dolto’s popular book-length case study, Le Cas Dominique (1971). It shows how Dolto manipulated the narrative of the case to bring it under the pathogenic family paradigm that she had developed with Mannoni, blaming Dominique’s condition on his mother. The chapter also demonstrates the largely favourable reception of Le Cas Dominique in the French press – before, in a short final section, illustrating the links between the Dolto-Mannoni approach to autism and the twenty-first-century scandal.